According to imdb Life of Brian was banned in Sweden up to the eighties (and Sweden is not your tyoical bigot country).
List looks a bit too anglo-centric (Britain&US).

I agree, that "The War Game" should have made the list.
Punishment Park (by Peter Watkins too) would have the full potential (especially today) but has been effectively suppressed in the US (I think any TV station or cinema showing it would be firebombed by Bushistas).

One time my New Testament class ended with the professor singing, "Always Look at the Bright Side of Life." That was a great class. We were supposed to have a discussion about the Passion of the Christ, but not enough people in the class wanted to see it. (I think the only people who saw it were a few girls who were some type of Bible literalists that didn't like the class because they learned that the books in the NT weren't actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc, and Paul didn't write all of the letters!)

I must agree with Cap on this one - it is highly dependent on the time and contemporaneous social atmosphere. To a modern audience Birth of a Nation is not a big deal - but put into a Jim Crow context it was huge. Another - it's not a movie but a song - was Billie Holliday's rendition of Strange Fruit. People walked out on her when she sung it, but today the topic of lynching is not easily grasped and the lyrics seem irrelevant. To a black in the 1920's the subject was more than an abstraction.

The lyrics were written by a New York Jew, but it was highly controversial - particularly in the south - when she did it. If it were done by a lesser light it would have been unnoticed.

Christ you know it ain't easy,You know how hard it can be.The way things are goingThey're gonna crucify me.----------
Ballad of John and Yoko

Strictly spoken there is nothing blasphemous in LoB. Jesus just quotes himself and is portrayed in no disrespectful way. The comments of others concerning Jesus should be their problem.
Holy Grail would be a much "better" candidate for charges of blasphemy.

dukes wrote:I must agree with Cap on this one - it is highly dependent on the time and contemporaneous social atmosphere. To a modern audience Birth of a Nation is not a big deal - but put into a Jim Crow context it was huge.

I watched Birth of a Nation in my film history class in school (as the first feature-length movie ever, it is quite historically significant in that respect alone); I'd say that even (or especially) from a modern point of view it is a very disturbing film, especially when the impact it had is considered.

Birth of a Nation and the world's first live TV broadcast (Hitler's speech at the 1936 Olympic Games) are two events that for me are the definition of bittersweet: it seemed a shame that these major technical acheivments were introduced to the world in such an awful way.

If one reads the user comments on imdb on Birth of a Nation, one has to realize that the mindset has not yet died out. Some praise Griffin (not the seldomly used one) for truthfully depicting the true saviours of the South, the KKK